‘Someone certainly didn’t like Damian Cowper,’ he said.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. I thought of what Grace had told us after the funeral. ‘This was planned, wasn’t it? Someone put the music player in the coffin because they knew it would get to Damian. They wanted to drive him away so he’d be on his own. But why him? If this is all about the accident in Deal, he can hardly take the blame. He wasn’t even in the car.’
‘You’ve got a point.’
I tried to think it through. A woman drives a car recklessly and kills a child. Ten years later, she is punished. But why extend that to her son? Could there be some biblical reason: an eye for an eye? That made no sense. Diana Cowper was already dead. If someone had wanted to use her son to hurt her, they would have killed him first.
‘His mother didn’t go to the police at first, because she was trying to protect him,’ I mused. ‘That was the reason why she drove away. Maybe it was enough to make him responsible.’
Hawthorne thought for a moment in silence – but not about what I’d said. ‘I’ve got to leave you for a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ve already called 999. But I’ve got to check the flat.’
‘Go ahead.’
Funnily enough, it was something I remembered from our time working on Injustice. We had been talking about one of the scenes in Episode One, when the animal rights activist is found dead in a farmhouse. Hawthorne had told me then that when a body is discovered, the first priority for any policeman or detective will be their own self-preservation. Are they under threat? Is the assailant still in the building? They’ll make sure they’re safe. Then they’ll look for possible witnesses … classically, the child hiding in the wardrobe or under the bed. Hawthorne would have dialled 999 while I was lying on the floor. I suppose it was nice of him to notice me at all.
He left the room, disappearing up the spiral staircase. I sat in the armchair trying to ignore the body, trying not even to think of the dreadful injuries. It wasn’t easy. If I closed my eyes, I became more aware of the smell. If I opened them, I found myself glimpsing the blood, the sprawled-out limbs. I had to turn my head away to keep Damian Cowper out of my line of vision.
And then he groaned.
I twisted round, thinking I’d imagined it. But there it was again, a quite gruesome, rattling sound. Damian’s head was facing away from me but I was quite certain it was coming from him.
‘Hawthorne!’ I shouted. At the same time, I felt the bile rising in my throat. ‘Hawthorne!’
He came hurrying back down the stairs. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Damian. He’s alive.’
He looked at me doubtfully, then went over to the body. ‘No, he isn’t,’ he said, tersely.
‘I just heard him.’
Damian moaned again, louder this time. I hadn’t imagined it. He was trying to speak.
But Hawthorne just sniffed. ‘Stay where you are, Tony, and forget about it, all right? His muscles are stiffening and that includes the muscles around his vocal cords. And there are gases in his stomach which are trying to escape. That’s all you’re hearing. It happens all the time.’
‘Oh.’ I profoundly wished that I wasn’t here. Not for the first time, I wished that I’d never agreed to write this bloody book.
Hawthorne lit a cigarette.
‘Did you find anything upstairs?’ I asked.
‘There’s no-one else here,’ he said.
‘You knew he was going to be killed.’
‘I knew it was a possibility.’
‘How?’
He cupped his hand and tapped ash into his palm. I could see that he was reluctant to tell me. ‘I was stupid,’ he said, at last. ‘But when the two of us were here the first time, you distracted me.’
‘So it was my fault?’
‘I told you, when I’m talking to someone, I need to focus and when you interrupt, it sort of breaks what I’m thinking, my train of thought.’ He softened. ‘It was my fault. I’ll hold my hands up. I was the one who missed it.’
‘Missed what?’
‘Damian said that his mum came in and watered the plants on the terrace. He said she forwarded his mail. I should have remembered. When we were at Diana Cowper’s place, there were five hooks in the kitchen. Do you remember?’
‘They were on a wooden fish.’
‘That’s right. And there were four sets of keys. If Diana Cowper was coming in here while he was in LA, it followed that she had his keys but I didn’t see one with that label.’
‘There was an empty hook.’
‘That’s right. Someone kills her. They search the place. They notice the keys. And they take the opportunity to snatch them.’ He stopped and I saw him playing back what he had just said. ‘That’s one possibility anyway.’
I heard the stamp of feet on the stairs leading up to the front door and a moment later, two uniformed police constables arrived. They looked from the body to the two of us, trying to work out what was going on.
‘Stay right where you are,’ the first one said. ‘Who made the call?’
‘I did,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And you took your time getting here.’
‘Who are you, sir?’
‘Ex-Detective Inspector Hawthorne, formerly with MIT. I’ve already contacted DI Meadows. I’ve reason to believe that this murder may be connected to a current investigation. You’d better get in the local DI and the murder squad.’
The British police have a particular way of addressing each other, a formal and slightly tortuous turn-of-phrase, as in ‘I have reason to believe’ and ‘contacted’ instead of ‘called’. It’s one reason why I’ve always found them so difficult to dramatise on television. It’s hard to care about a character who talks in clichés. They also look so much less interesting than their American counterparts, with their white shirts, stab vests and those hopeless blue helmets. No guns. No sunglasses. These two policemen were young and earnest. One was Asian, the other white. They hardly spoke to us again.
One of them took out his radio and called in the situation while Hawthorne set about examining the room for himself. I watched him as he went over to the door that led out to the terrace. He was careful not to touch the handle, using a handkerchief which he pulled out of his pocket. The door was unlocked. He disappeared outside and although I was still feeling dreadful, I hauled myself out of the chair and followed. The policemen had made their calls. They didn’t seem to have anything else to do. They glanced uncertainly in my direction as I left. They hadn’t even asked who I was.
I felt better immediately, being out in the afternoon air. Like the interior of the flat, the terrace – with its deckchairs, potted plants and gas barbecue – reminded me of a studio set. It resembled the balcony where Joey and Chandler and the rest of them used to hang out in Friends, looking out towards the back of the building with a metal fire escape leading to an alleyway. Hawthorne was standing at the edge, gazing down. I noticed he had taken off his shoes, presumably to avoid leaving footprints. He was smoking again. He consumed a suicidal number of cigarettes a day; at least twenty, maybe more. He turned round as I approached.
‘He was waiting out here,’ he said. ‘By the time Damian Cowper got back from the funeral, he’d already let himself into the flat, using the keys he’d taken from Britannia Road. Then he came out here and he waited. He also left this way when it was over.’
‘Wait a minute. How do you know all that? How do you even know it was a he?’
‘Diana Cowper was strangled with a curtain cord. Her son was chopped to pieces. The killer was either a man or a really, really angry woman.’
‘What about the rest of it? How can you be sure that’s how the murder happened?’
Hawthorne just shrugged.